28 September 2010

The CodePlex Foundation is now the OuterCurve Foundation

The CodePlex Foundation has re-branded itself to the OuterCurve Foundation. There continued to be confusion between the Foundation originally sponsored by Microsoft and the Microsoft forge site (codeplex.com). In June the Board decided it was time to rebrand the organization to clear up the confusion. [Most recently we were given credit for some excellent sponsor work the forge did in the open source community, so we knew the rebranding work was still necessary.]

We worked with a professional agency (Protobrand) and investigated a number of names that conveyed attributes we wanted to have associated with the Foundation. We wanted the name to support our efforts to build credibility for the Foundation within the open source community, and make the Foundation an attractive investment for additional sponsors. And of course we also had to find a name where we could own the urls. In the end we chose the OuterCurve Foundation. We hope it conveys our goal of helping the expanding universe of companies using open source to contribute to the communities they care about and to create their own.

A number of press articles have positioned us as "putting some distance between Microsoft and the Foundation" as the rationale for the rebrand, and I want to emphasize that the distance we're hoping to create is between the forge and the Foundation. We have an excellent working relationship with Microsoft as our founding sponsor. The Codeplex name was originally chosen as there was thought to be more affinity between the forge and the Foundation but it proved not to be so. Not every plan is flawless in its entirety.

The rebranding also coincides with our anniversary. The Foundation is now a year old. In that year, the interim Board put an initial governance structure in place, hired core staff (Paula and I) and we have accepted the creation of two galleries and a half dozen projects. More are on their way. The mission hasn't changed. The Outercurve Foundation exists to provide a software IP management process and project development governance to enable organizations to develop software collaboratively and encourage the growth of the open source software as a development methodology. It's an exciting time.